My web host told me that the Museum of Hoaxes is using too much bandwidth, and that I either reduce the usage or upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan. Since I’m cheap and poor, I’m choosing Option A.

Therefore, as of right now, I’ve decided to stop hosting everyone’s avatars. It’s a luxury I can no longer afford.

Instead, I’ve set up the forum to allow people to use avatars from gravatar.com. Just sign up with gravatar. It’s free. If the email you give them matches the email you used to register with the Museum of Hoaxes, then your avatar should display here. (Fingers crossed.)

In the meantime, I haven’t deleted your avatars. You can still view them on your member profile page. They’re simply not being displayed on the forum.

I’ve set the Gravatar plugin to display only PG and G rated avatars. This is a family friendly forum, after all.

I’m sure there will be some bugs to iron out before everything works perfectly, but hopefully this will give us the best of both worlds. It’ll save me money and allow everyone to have an avatar.